Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Lake Randsfjorden & Dokkadeltaet National Wetland Center

The northern end of Lake Randsfjorden in Oppland, Norway. The wetlands of the Dokka Delta is situated here, where the river meets the lake. Full resolution available here.

Wisit the website of Dokkadeltaet National Wetland Center here.
North of Oslo, west of Lillehammer and south of the highest mountains in Norway, Jotunheimen, water drains through mires, creeks and rivers into the ramsar site and nature reserve, Dokkadelta. The water from the alpine mountain region Synnfjell runs through the protected river Etna and through the river Dokka, passing several aqua power stations, into the fourth biggest lake of Norway, Randsfjord. Wetlands, creeks, rivers, forest and vast alpine mountains invite to experience the landscape of the municipalities Northern Land, Southern Land and Etnedal in the county of Oppland. 
Dokkadelta National Wetland Centre has got the task to develop this compact ecosystem for experiencing the strong bonds to nature in the culture of this region. But also protecting the biological diversity of this typical nordic wetland ecosystem for further generations. Nature, where the black throated diver calls on the foggy lake at dawn, and the capercaillie play games on the mires at spring. Where pike and trout grow to capital size, moose is resting in the meadows and the trumpet of cranes sounds through the valley. Where the full moon paints the winter forest in silver blue and ski trails wind through the mountains of silence. Where beaver and men work in the forest and river shells tell their stories of the century. An ecosystem for knowledge and experiences. 
We wish you welcome to visit our region. On a journey to our birds, our animals, our fish, our plants, our insects and us, the people of Land and Etnedal. For experiencing fjell, rivers or taiga forests. For the adventure of dog sledding, bird watching, canoeing, hiking, cycling, fishing, hunting, picking berries, backcountry skiing or wilderness camping. Or for sensing the nordic nature on a chair of experiences? 
Novalis wrote: "If you hear the butterfly laugh, you know how a cloud smells.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

A Response from VillageTowns

Editorial Notes

A response from VillageTowns:

We were delighted to read the review of our VillageTown work and would like to add some comments, but your comments section is closed.

Øyvind Holmstad wrote "Unfortunately they don’t seem have the same enthusiasm for the compost toilet, but hopefully they’ll take this advice from Lester Brown."


We did read the links provided, but note that Lester Brown writes: "Collected urine can be trucked to nearby farms". That means we need trucks which means the VillageTown need to buy trucks, fuel them and use roads to transport the urine in those trucks. And where do we store the urine until it is collected? Do we need to include urine storage tanks in each house? That adds a few hundred dollars and then means we need to send trucks around to empty them. How long do we leave the urine in the tank before collecting it? And how do we vent the tanks if people have roof gardens up where the vent pipes need to go? The same problem holds for the faeces. A composting toilet makes sense in a low-density community such as an eco-village especially where the compost is dumped outside in the veggie garden by the home occupant. But it becomes a numbers problem in a common locality large enough to support a complex local economy (4,000 homes) that is intended as a complete community, which includes people with phobias about handling their own effluent, no matter how nice it smells. As the other link provided by Holmstad notes, it remains a taboo subject. Presuming each home has 2 composting toilets and each one must be emptied every six months (as manufacturers recommend), that means 16,000 clean-outs each year. With 250 working days a year, that means 64 toilets cleaned out every day, vehicles to pick up the compost and haul it away for the farms. And, while it is clean compost, it still will contain the heavy metals and the non-biodegradable medications that humans consume and expel. The important thing to understand here, that there is no inherent opposition to composting toilets. Rather it is a question of engineering. We are not advocating the 19th century solution that the referenced Lester R. Brown criticises. We agree with his points. When dealing with 4,000 homes however, all paid for and built at the same time, there probably are smarter engineering solutions.

The first point of agreement is that urine and faeces are not waste but surplus material. They have chemical and nutrient value, and it is an absurd waste to contaminate drinking water to shift them or to co-mingle them. Get them to the production centre in as pure a form as possible - as pure as they came out of the human body. To do this, first look at the Swedish separator toilets. Install two pipes, one for urine and the other for faeces. Use water or an equivalent medium to transport these surplus materials to the processing plant. At the plant, use appropriate technology to deal both with the medication issue (antibiotics, birth control and other medications expelled by the body) and the heavy metal issue that otherwise could concentrate these harmful or toxic chemicals in the food systems. Determine what nutrients are used for farm fertiliser (for example, feeding tilapia fish that are then ground up for fertiliser and mixed with food compost) and what may be used to brew alcohol that powers the farm tractors. Using biological systems, purify the transport water to a quality deemed safe to then return to the toilet so that it functions in a closed loop system much like the radiator in a modern car. Once charged, the system uses no new water, it just uses water as the transport system.

Beyond the two toilet pipes, we imagine more water pipes coming out of each home. Pipes are a lot cheaper than trucks, and once installed can last for centuries and require no personnel or vehicles. Install a pipe that goes to the kitchen sink, and install something akin to the old-fashioned garbage disposal for food scraps. Pipe those ground-up scraps to the food compost processing plant where they are higher quality surplus materials for compost, fertiliser or brewing stock for fuel. Don't use drinking water to run the disposal unit, but have an automatic feeder pipe below the sink that uses grey water. Have another pipe that comes from the roof to collect clean storm water, direct this to a reservoir. Instead of washing machines in every home, provide local laundries for villagers that uses closed loop water systems. This is especially important in places like Australia which just came off a ten-year drought.

In all of these ideas, do note that the decisions are not made in an ivory tower, or by the VillageTown Stewards as know-it-alls. Rather they are made when the funds have been raised and the project begins. They are made by scientists and engineers who are given a set of principles instructing them to find the best, smartest, most sustainable methods for solving age-old problems. The sad fact is that some of the best ideas out there get no funding because the system is too closed minded. The VillageTown approaches the industry with an open-mind, seeking the best solutions the market has to offer, and it does so with funds.

On another subject, thanks for the heads-up on "Alexander’s latest achievement, Generative Codes." We'll make sure it gets in there. Actually, we hope that when we get funding that Christopher Alexander and some of his co-authors may consider becoming consultants to the first project. There are some outstanding experts and many are happy to help, if we have the funds to pay them.

VillageTown Stewards


Related reading:

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Geospatial Analysis and Living Urban Geometry

Suburban garden. Photo: Philip Talmage

"This essay outlines how to incorporate morphological rules within the exigencies of our technological age. We propose using the current evolution of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technologies beyond their original representational domain, towards predictive and dynamic spatial models that help in constructing the new discipline of "urban seeding". We condemn the high-rise tower block as an unsuitable typology for a living city, and propose to re-establish human-scale urban fabric that resembles the traditional city. Pedestrian presence, density, and movement all reveal that open space between modernist buildings is not urban at all, but neither is the open space found in today's sprawling suburbs. True urban space contains and encourages pedestrian interactions, and has to be designed and built according to specific rules. The opposition between traditional self-organized versus modernist planned cities challenges the very core of the urban planning discipline. Planning has to be re-framed from being a tool creating a fixed future to become a visionary adaptive tool of dynamic states in evolution."

Read the essay by Nikos A. Salingaros et.al.: Geospatial Analysis and Living Urban Geometry

Friday, November 18, 2011

Just Another Failed "Tower in the Park" (at Grefsen Station, Oslo)


This new project at old Grefsen Station is advertised to become one of Oslo's largest and most exiting housing projects. Well, some still think Le Corbusier's old idea of "the tower in the park" is modern and exiting. A pity his ideas didn't follow him into the grave, but continue to multiply.

By the way, the main investor of this project is ROM Eiendom, the same company that is given the task to develop the new Oslo Central Station area. I guess you can see the same flawed typologies: From Stone Desert to Glass Desert.

(Typologies like just a hole in the wall for windows to empathize the machine age, the windows exactly wrong to make the building "exiting", vertical pull design etc.)
Poor urbanism continues to be practiced, enthusiastically supported by the universities, because both private developers and city governments refuse to accept the scientific basis of good urbanism. They continue to listen to academic experts who dismiss human-scale solutions so as to promote their own ideologically-based mechanistic fantasies. - Nikos Salingaros

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Vi har gjort nok ugagn nå

Bjørvika er et eksempel på kald, kynisk eiendomsutvikling. Utbyggingen er foreldet før den er ferdig, skriver kronikkforfatteren. FOTO: Rolf Øhman
Gi meg en inviterende, nedskalert, menneskelig byorganisme, der det gode byliv kan utfolde seg. De høye egoistiske seg selv-nok bygningene burde vi være ferdige med. - Niels A. Torp
Translated: Give me an inviting, down scaled, human city organism, where the pleasures of city life can unfold. The high, egoistic, its self enough buildings we should be finished with. 
Herlig! Til dags dato den beste artikkelen som er skrevet om den pågående raseringen av min kjære hovedstad!

Les kronikken til Niels A. Torp i Aftenposten: Vi har gjort nok ugagn nå

ECONOMY: Money and Energy

EXCERPT:
Money and energy have always been linked. For example, a gold currency was essentially an energy currency because the amount of gold produced in a year was determined by the cost of the energy it took to extract it. If energy (perhaps in the form of slaves or horses rather than fossil fuel) was cheap and abundant, goldmining would prove profitable, and a lot of gold would go into circulation enabling more trading to be done. If the increased level of activity then drove the price of slaves or coal up, the flow of gold would decline, slowing the rate at which the economy grew. It was a neat,natural balancing mechanism which worked rather well. In fact, the only time it broke down seriously was when the Spanish conquistadors got gold for very little energy—by stealing it from the Aztecs and the Incas. That caused a massive inflation and damaged the Spanish economy for many years.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Frå ideologi til teknologi

Michael Mehaffy og Nikos Salingaros har for tida ein serie av essay gåande i Metropolis Magazine, dei vert samla her. Eg har inga aning om kor lenge han vil gå - vonleg for alltid. Men same det så er det på høg at denne serien vert introdusert for eit norsk publikum, og eg vil fokusera på dei fyrste fem essaya om teknologiane til Christopher Alexander.

Essaya om Alexander sine teknologiar i kronologisk rekkjefylgje: 
Mønstre i sand orsaka av ferskvatnsavrenning. Foto: Martyn Gorman

Det tjugene hundreåret var ideologiane sitt hundreår, men alt i hop enda i vitlaus konsumerisme. Så det er openbart at ideologiar aleine ikkje har noko godt svar, sjølv om dei kan helde på mang ei sanning og vera ein reiskap for å sameina folk i eit felles krafttak. Lell vert dette fåfengd om folk ikkje har dei rette verktøya, eller endå verre, dei nyttar seg av "dødens teknologiar".
The insights we are gaining about these processes are opening the door to a new chapter in design — an era of “bio-design”, “biophilia”, and “biomimicry”. It’s an exciting promise, particularly in an era when our old technologies seem to be failing us. The crude industrial processes that powered our world for a century or more leave us with depletion, fragmentation, and decay. Living systems can show us the way to recover and sustain the damaged systems upon which life depends.

The design theorist Christopher Alexander has argued that similar processes have gone on throughout our own human history, and throughout the history of life itself. Life is a kind of “making” process of unfolding and differentiating production. The “technology of life” is governed by knowable steps. And we had better learn how to apply it, if we are not to be destroyed by the unsustainable technologies that surround us today: what we might call, on strictly scientific grounds, the “technologies of death”. – The Living Technology of Christopher Alexander

Redear Sunfish

Amazing!

"Fractalism" is the Best Model for Future Societies

What a fantastic article by Kevin Carson in today's p2p-blog! This build up under the statement of Nikos Salingaros that every stable system has fractal properties, where the smaller and smaller units outnumber the larger by far in numbers. We have no better way to organize ourselves if we want to become part of nature, something we cannot avoid if we want our societies to survive.

A fractal society will surely blossom! Photo: Dr. L. Rempe

As the p2p philosophy is a free culture, I reprint the whole article.

How Much of the Economy is Friction?

Charles Hugh Smith raises the question of how much of the U.S. economy consists of the actual output of goods and services, versus the friction entailed in producing them. As a small example, he cites a physicians’ group that includes ten doctors — and twelve billing clerks.

That’s the general subject of a research paper I did for Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), The Political Economy of Waste.

The larger and more hierarchical institutions become, and the more centralized the economic system, the larger the total share of production that will go to overhead, administration, waste, and the cost of doing business. The reasons are structural and geometrical.

At its most basic, it’s an application of the old cube-square rule. When you double the dimensions of a solid object, you increase its surface area fourfold (two squared), but its volume eightfold (two cubed). Similarly, the number of internal relationships in an organization increases as the square of the number of individuals making it up.

Leopold Kohr gave the example, in The Overdeveloped Nations, of a skyscraper. The more stories you add, the larger the share of floor space on each story is taken up by ventilation ducts, wiring and pipes, elevator shafts, stairwells, etc. Eventually you reach a point at which the increased space produced by adding stories is entirely eaten up by the increased support infrastructure.

Do Plants Perform Best With Family or Strangers? Researchers Consider Social Interactions

Poppies and oilseed rape Poppies and other wild flowers mix in with the crop at the edge of the bridleway
A growing body of work suggests plants recognize and respond to the presence and identity of their neighbours. But can plants cooperate with their relatives? While some studies have shown that siblings perform best -- suggesting altruism towards relatives -- other studies have shown that when less related plants grow together the group can actually outperform siblings. This implies the group benefits from its diversity by dividing precious resources effectively and competing less. - Science Daily
This small article in Science Daily held some interesting thoughts about the permaculture practise of guildsDo Plants Perform Best With Family or Strangers? Researchers Consider Social Interactions

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Brains Come Wired for Cooperation

"What we learned is that when it comes to the brain and cooperation, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts," said Fortune, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part." Science Daily

This study fits very well to the last essay of Mehaffy and Salingaros about self organizing of cities. We are created for cooperation, for the creation of unfolding, living structure. It's just our governments and the corporations which restrict cooperation and unfolding to happen naturally, and thus destroy communities in the name of modernism.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Fyrrig furu i herlig naturhus

Foto: Bjørn Erik Larsen

Sjelden lekkerbisken av en interiørartikkel i Aftenposten, fra det livlige furu- og natursteinshuset til arkitekt Bjørn Eik og kona Grethe. Herlig å se en artikkel som avviker fra det sedvanlige boligporno-konseptet!

Les artikkelen: De har huset fullt av trær.

Besøk Arkitektkontoret Eik her.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward


Dokumentaren er tekstet på norsk.

Den tredje veg

Les artikkelen til Dave Pollard: All About Power, and the Three Ways to Topple It (Part 1).

Dave Pollard lister i denne interressante analysen opp tre veier for en endring av nåværende verdensorden. Han faller ned på den tredje vei som den beste, å utsulte det nåværende systemet.
The third way to bring about major global change is incapacitation — rendering the old order unable to function by sapping what it needs to survive. This is the method that disease uses to prey on fragile and vulnerable organs, that parasites and venomous creatures use to weaken and sometimes kill their (much larger) hosts, that terrorists use to paralyze their enemies, and that innovative businesses use to undermine, render obsolete and supplant bigger, less flexible businesses. For those of us with neither the patience or religious fanaticism to wait for a global natural catastrophe, nor the naivety to believe in a successful ‘popular’ revolution, this third way is the only way to change, and save, our beleaguered planet.
Meget interressant! Problemet er naturligvis at uten innsikt i Alexanders teknologier vil også denne veien feile. Nettopp derfor er det at jeg har viet mitt liv til å studere disse teknologiene, for å inkorporere dem i permakulturbevegelsen, eller den stille revolusjon, som den også kalles. Utsultingen av nåværende verdensorden må skje gjennom permakulturens utbredelse, og gjennom at denne gjennomsyres av den nye kunnskapen gitt til verden av Christopher Alexander.

Relatert:

Barry Schwartz: The Real Crisis? We Stopped Being Wise

Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for practical wisdom as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world. - TED-Talk

Can We Have Post-Peak Oil Thrivable Societies?

Thursday, November 3, 2011

"I find the ideas in the fractals, both as a body of knowledge and as a metaphor, an incredibly important way of looking at the world." - Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, New York Times, Wednesday, June 21, 2000, discussing some of the "big think" questions that intrigue him
An Escheresque fractal by Peter Raedschelders
Further reading:

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

La oss slippe unaturlig stråling

I Øst–Europa er grenseverdien satt til en 10 000-ende del av den vi har i Vesten. Denne forsiktighet er blitt latterliggjort og forskningsmessig «motbevist» av Strålevernet. Men i mai ga Europarådet anbefaling om å «redusere grenseverdien for innendørs mikrobølgestråling med en faktor på 10 000 i første omgang». I tillegg anbefales å «forby trådløst nett og bruk av mobiltelefon og trådløse fasttelefoner i klasserom og barnehager». Det økende antall barn med hjernesvulster har antagelig bidratt til ny forsiktighet. Her har selv motstand mot babycall blir oversett. Som engasjert i trafikksikring, helseskader ved røyking og bruk av amalgam har jeg, i begynnelsen av slikt helsearbeid, fått høre hvor hysteriske krav om endringer har vært. Som «konspirasjonsteoretiker» gjelder det nå også etter syv års engasjement for de EL–sensitive. - Berit Ås
For meg er det revnende likegyldig om det er farlig med ikke-ioniserende stråling eller ei, selv om jeg er engstelig for min datter og eksponerer henne minst mulig. Poenget er at det er utrivelig med alt som er unaturlig, også unaturlige elektromagnetiske felt. Dessuten er mastene angstskapende i seg selv!

Høyspentmaster forbi småbruket Gryteengen på Østre Toten, 15 m unna huset og 5 m fra hagen. Dette småbruket skulle jeg ha arvet og gjort til en permakulturgård, men jeg orker ikke å leve mitt liv under ei høyspentmast. Å anlegge kraftgater innen permakulturens sone 1 og 2 må bli forbudt, da det er her designet er som mest intensivt, og kraftgater her ødelegger alt. Mine historiske røtter er brutalt revet opp av en arrogant og likegyldig stat. Og verden har gått glipp av en permakultur-demonstrasjonsgård.

Jeremy Rifkin on the Real Nature of Our Triple Crisis: Peak Globalization, Peak Oil, and 3 Degrees Climate Change

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Let's Enter the Fractal World of Christopher Alexander!

In a Freudian sense, we are witnessing the return of the repressed. If you tell people for two decades that there is no alternative to the world in which they live, and if in the meantime you take away their income, their rights, their public services, and their last-remaining shreds of dignity, you can expect that psychological repression of revolutionary potential to come out in some other form sooner or later. If you repress the coherent emancipatory ideology of the masses, as the End of History was meant to do, you literally end up with the incoherent and a-political London riots. In this respect, the most important thing the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions could have done was to help remind humanity that there actually is an alternative to the status quo — that there does exist some “outside” to unfettered global capitalism. - Jerome Roos
Please read the whole article: Jérôme E. Roos: The year 2011 marks the end of the End of History".

There exist an alternative to ideology, this is permaculture and science. All sustainable systems, all over the Universe and in all natural systems on Earth, are fractal. This is stated by Nikos Salingaros and others. To integrate fractal systems in our societies we must use patterns to form coherent and interconnected pattern languages, using Christopher Alexander’s pattern technology. Further we must replace the dead technologies of the 20th century with living technology, using the living technologies of Christopher Alexander.

Capitalism is anti-fractal, socialism is anti-fractal, so let’s leave all this old stuff behind and enter the fractal world of Christopher Alexander!

 Iterated function system fractal. Vicsek fractal becoming tree. Photo: Edo 555 

Se verdens største utdødde hakkespett på film

Original cover painting for
October 2011 issue of 
The Auk by Evaristo Hernández-Fernández,
Bartels Science Illustration Program
at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
"The Imperial Woodpecker", dette kan vel oversettes med noe slikt som imperiehakkespetten på norsk, holdt til i Mexicos gamle skoger. I dag er både den og skogene forsvunnet, og verden har blitt et fattigere sted. Lenge trodde man heller ikke at det fantes bilder eller film av denne fascinerende fuglen, inntil man oppsporet et 16 mm 1968-opptak av en tannlege fra Pennsylvania.

Les historien hos Science Daily, eller gå direkte til The Imperial Woodpecker Film.

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